ABSTRACT

Goldberg explores the pressure that social regularities can generate for members of certain communities. In particular, he argues that when communities have signaling practices, these practices give community members some practice-specific reasons. These include reasons for a member to indicate publically when she is opting out of the practice. An agent ought not, given the right background practice, just to quietly opt out of signaling. She ought to make her defection explicit—it ought to be voiced. This pressure is generated by fairly weak and plausible epistemic and ethical principles and bears directly on the ethics and epistemology of dissent.